What we are accustomed to call the Renaissance began as a
rediscovery of older knowledge, and flowered as a series of
new discoveries and new attitudes.

In the particular alchemy of the social and political climate
of Florence* in the late fourteenth
century, humanism was born: scholars and administrators read
the Latin of Vergil and Cicero, and explored Greek writers
for the first time in centuries. Contact with earlier ways of
seeing the world encouraged a new exploration of ideas, of
art, and of the physical universe.

Even a modest exploration of the Italian Renaissance would
take a siteCD-ROM at
least as big as this one on Shakespeare. The roll-call of
notable Italian renaissance figures is formidable: The
Medicis, Petrarch,
Botticelli, Ghiberti,
Donatello, Michaelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci,
Raphael, Ficino, Pico della
Mirandola, Savonarola, Machiavelli,
Castiglione, Tasso, Ariosto,
Alberti . . .

From Florence the movement of minds widened to include the
whole of Italy, spreading through France, and finally
reaching England about a century later.

From the literal to the symbolic

A movement as complex as the Renaissance cannot be summed up
in a sentence or two; but there was one fundamental change in
the way humans looked at the world: from a belief in the
literal interconnectedness of all things--
correspondences that
dictated when a physician should administer a
medicine according to the
position of the planets, for example--writers and thinkers
questioned the connections, while retaining a sense of their
beauty as symbols. Thus Falstaff, skeptic and cynic,
parodies the earlier literal
belief in the human body as a reflection and representation
of the state in a comic attack on John of Lancaster's
seriousness.

Footnotes

Names of the Italian Renaissance

Even a modest exploration of the Italian Renaissance would
take a siteCD-ROM at
least as big as this one on Shakespeare. The roll-call of
notable Italian renaissance figures is formidable: The
Medicis, Petrarch,
Botticelli, Ghiberti,
Donatello, Michaelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci,
Raphael, Ficino, Pico della
Mirandola, Savonarola, Machiavelli,
Castiglione, Tasso, Ariosto,
Alberti . . .